Hold the Mozart

New works by John Adams and György Kurtág in Vienna.

When, in October of last year, John Adams unveiled “Doctor Atomic,” his opera of nuclear hubris and fear, he might have been expected to take a week or two off, or, at least, a day. Instead, on the afternoon following the première, in San Francisco, he sat down with the director Peter Sellars to plot out a new piece. The two longtime collaborators looked over a volume of South Indian oral tales, as rendered in English by the folklorist A. K. Ramanujan, and chose one about a woman who transforms herself into a tree. “A Flowering Tree,” the result of their labors, had its première earlier this month at the MuseumsQuartier, in Vienna. The score is opulent, dreamlike, fiercely lyrical, at times shadowy and strange—unlike anything that the fifty-nine-year-old composer has written.

Adams’s prior theatre pieces have addressed tense modern subjects: Nixon’s trip to China, the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake, and, of course, the atom bomb. The sudden swerve into a fairy-tale realm came in response to a mammoth project that Sellars is currently undertaking in Vienna: a genre-spanning festival called New Crowned Hope, which is linked to the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Mozart’s birth. The name is taken from Mozart’s Masonic lodge, and the aim is to refract the composer’s spirit—in particular, his recurrent themes of transformation and reconciliation—through a modern prism. By the time the festival ends, on December 13th, there will have been films from Chad, Indonesia, and Kurdish Iran; dance works from Congo, Cambodia, and Maori New Zealand; a concert by the Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré; six concerts by the Kronos Quartet; a new opera-oratorio by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho; and a bit of Mozart, choreographed by Mark Morris. In a mission statement, Sellars said, “Where Mozart ended is where we begin,” inspiring snickers in the German-language press about American naïveté. In fact, Sellars has very craftily figured out how to obtain ten million euros from the Austrian government to commission work that he likes.

“A Flowering Tree,” for its part, takes off from “The Magic Flute.” In both operas, the love of a prince and a maiden endures after a long separation and painful trials. There is also a kinship with Richard Strauss’s autumnal masterpiece “Daphne,” based on the ancient Greek myth of arboreal metamorphosis. But, where Daphne’s transformation is permanent, Kumudha, in the Indian tale, can move in and out of her tree shape when pitchers of water are poured on her body. The Prince falls in love with her and marries her. The trials begin when the Prince’s sister exploits the magic for public show and neglectfully leaves Kumudha trapped in a grotesque hybrid state, whereupon she crawls away from her husband in shame. Only when the Prince recognizes her voice in a travelling band of minstrels is she restored to humanity.

In keeping with Sellars’s cosmopolitan concept, other cultural layers were added to the Indian core. Adams, who crafted his own libretto from Ramanujan’s text, wrote mostly in English, but he translated the choruses into Spanish, in recognition of the fact that the orchestra and the chorus performing at the première—the Joven Camerata and the Schola Cantorum—were from Venezuela. That country, whatever its political difficulties, possesses a remarkable music-education system, instructing hundreds of thousands of kids from poor areas; young players mixed with adults in the Camerata’s ranks. There was also choreography for three Indonesian dancers. Adams, who conducted the première, was the only Anglo-Saxon male in the pit or on the stage.

“A Flowering Tree” could easily have turned into a sort of giddy multicultural jamboree. But Adams’s score has its own agenda. The first sound that floats out of the orchestra is a chattering series of alternating thirds in the upper strings, which calls to mind not only the rustling of leaves but a passage in the second movement of Sibelius’s Sixth Symphony. Adams often begins a new work with an allusion to an existing one, and his nod toward Sibelius’s moody, enigmatic late style immediately puts the fairy tale in a different light. Of course, there are plenty of bewitching spells of rhythm and color: the marvellous Schola Cantorum singers are given swinging, syncopated choruses; the orchestra constantly shimmers and glows, with harp, celesta, exotic percussion, and two recorders adding hyperimpressionistic refinement; several surges of clean-lined melody are worthy of Leonard Bernstein. Yet behind it all is a brooding sensibility, which speaks through groping passages of recitative (often using the opaque whole-tone scale), pale string choirs, subterranean rumblings of brass, and sometimes gnashing dissonances.

Indeed, despite the happy ending, this little tale is actually quite dark: Kumudha’s failed transformation evokes all the wrecked natural beauty that the march of human progress has left in its wake. The point is driven home in the opera’s last minutes, when Kumudha’s final transformation occurs. The orchestra delivers a climactic commentary that sounds simultaneously like a shout of joy and a cry for help. Sinuous triplet figures gradually accelerate through different sections of the orchestra and move upward in register as the chorus sustains the note B. That note then becomes the center of a blazing B-major triad, but the gestation of the chord is painful and protracted, with sharp semitone dissonances persisting right up to the final bar. The ghost of Sibelius hovers again: the master’s Seventh Symphony ends with a sustained C-major chord through which a B burns for six slow beats. This is a hard-won triumph, from which not all shadows have been banished.

Sellars seems to have directed the show in a carefree mood: the stage pictures were crisp, and the action flowed with uncomplicated ease. Gabriel Berry outfitted both cast and orchestra in sumptuous Indian robes. George Tsypin created a handsome tree-branch-filled set, and James Ingalls diverted the eye with twinkling lights. Rusini Sidi, Eko Supriyanto, and Astri Kusama Wardani danced with slow, fluid, vital gestures. Of the singers, the charismatic bass Eric Owens had the most success at breathing life into the text, which, for all its charms, lacks the literary power of Alice Goodman’s librettos for “Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghoffer,” not to mention the poetic thunder of John Donne and Charles Baudelaire in “Doctor Atomic.” As Kumudha, Jessica Rivera showed a secure, beautiful soprano voice, and Russell Thomas had moments of keen expression as the Prince. The Joven Camerata played with high passion throughout. Of many vibrant sounds, I was most haunted by a sadly singing trumpet solo reminiscent of Miles Davis in “Sketches of Spain.”

Running concurrently in Vienna with New Crowned Hope is the Wien Modern festival, an annual series that honors the severe ideals of the post-war musical avant-garde. Here, to paraphrase the local style of new-music commentary, one finds no easy California dream of world harmony, no Big-Mac-Ästhetik, but, instead, unblinking encounters with the horror of modernity, a philosophy of resistance and negation, an adherence to the “aesthetic category of the new.” (I actually saw that phrase in a dismissive review of Adams’s opera.) Wien Modern’s contribution to the Mozart year had a distinctly churlish air: just before I arrived, it presented a new opera by Bernhard Lang entitled “I Hate Mozart,” about a “Magic Flute” staging gone awry.

The guest of honor, alongside Lang, was the great and mysterious Hungarian composer György Kurtág, who, at the age of eighty, is among the last survivors of the original avant-garde generation. He is a composer of neither/nor—neither ruthlessly new in his methods nor remotely traditional, neither atonal nor tonal. Every description of his work has to be qualified and qualified again: it is compressed but not dense, lyrical but not sweet, dark but not dismal, quiet but not calm. At first hearing, it suggests a cloistered, hermetic space, yet it is ventilated with many hidden influences, and has deep roots in the folk music of the Balkans. In truth, Kurtág could easily have been transplanted into Sellars’s one-world aesthetic, just as the darker strains in Adams’s opera could be assimilated into the “aesthetic category of the new,” whatever that might be. Major composers wreck all categories as they move along.

I was able to see only one of several Kurtág events that Wien Modern presented at the Konzerthaus, but I chose wisely: it turned out to be one of those uncanny experiences that only European concert halls can provide, in which voices seem to whisper out of the walls. In the first half, the violinist Hiromi Kikuchi played, with phenomenal conviction, Kurtág’s “Hipartita,” an alternately fantastical and meditative eight-part soliloquy that was finished in 2004. Then, in the second half, Kurtág himself came onstage, in the company of his wife, Márta, to perform selections from “Játékok” (“Games”), his eight-volume collection of miniatures for two- and four-hand piano. The Kurtágs played on what was described as a “piano con supersordino”—an upright piano whose mute pedal has been permanently depressed. An amplification system devised by the composer’s son, György Kurtág, Jr., allowed the instrument to resonate richly throughout the hall. You felt that you were eavesdropping on an intimate family affair: like some sweet old couple in a movie, the Kurtágs smiled at each other and allowed their bodies to sway with the music, apparently oblivious of the packed hall of new-music aficionados watching them.

But what playing! Notes were placed with surgical care; inner voices gleamed in crystalline patterns; elusive emotional states were painted with quick, light strokes. At the heart of the “Játékok” selections was “In Memoriam András Mihály,” a gentle, halting funeral procession that ends with spread-out white-key chords; it is music that must have deep meaning for Kurtág, as he orchestrated and elaborated it in the final movement of his 1994 orchestral masterpiece “Stele.” In his own rendition at the piano, it sounded like a choir of lost souls singing behind a wall of ice. No composer has more convincingly approximated the feeling of everything coming to an end. Still, the music played on, full of crying, laughing, and murmuring voices, like a music box that still makes sound after its parts have stopped moving. To close, the Kurtágs performed an arrangement of the opening movement of Bach’s cantata “Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit,” which was—how else to put it?—one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard. ♦

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